Saturday, February 22, 2014

Well, you can’t win them all. This perfectly fine looking
pork roast was the victim of a few easy-to-make mistakes, and hopefully by
watching this you’ll avoid such mishaps in the future. In exchange, you’ll have
to promise not to make fun of me.

The first, and most obvious error was way too much freshly
minced rosemary. I always tell people to be super-careful about adding this
resinous herb. I wasn’t paying attention, and just added what I had chopped
without thinking, and it was pretty much all over at that point.

Adding cream helped nothing, and only made the herbaceous
reduction more caloric and offensive. I probably could have added some lemon, mustard,
horseradish, or other heavy-hitting condiment, but by that time nothing was
going to unrosemary this train wreck.

On the bright side, the grapes were really good, and even
after 30 minutes in the oven, had a juicy, still-firm texture. Their warm
sweetness went very well with the meat. So, I hope you watch, critique, and
maybe adapt this potentially amazing recipe into something worthwhile. Enjoy!

48 comments:

"Offensive" is such a strong word and I love when it's applied to trivial things. Not that the ruined sauce was trivial... Glad you posted the Rosemary with Pork Loin and Grapes, still an enjoyable video!

By placing your students ahead of your ego and self by displaying a failure in order to teach, you have taken a very large step toward the league of Chef/Teachers that is lead by the great Julia Child.

I put salt instead of sugar in coffee once, it couldn't have been any worse than that. In fairness, the salt was in a small bowl, with a freakishly small plastic spoon in it at a brunch table. Com'on could have happened to anyone.

Hey John, thanks for sharing this! I've totally made the Rosemary foley a few times too! I love that herb and my wife does not! Frankly, we could discuss if that was too much or REALLY too much, but hehe my bon gout is sometimes coo-coo!

I wonder if adding something like apple sauce, instead of cream (or in addition to) and maybe Dijon mustard to the sauce would have saved it. Clearly would have changed the dish, but was noodling on what i would have done!

Last question, if you then saw the sauce was ruined early on, what about just starting over and cheating? Like quickly fry some bacon in a fresh pan, then onions/shallots, etc. clearly would have been emergency-more-power-Scotty efforts to save a sauce, but curious what you might have done in a restaurant situation?

I giggled a little, but not completely at your expense, Chef John. I too have had a big rosemary fail. I made a Rosemary scented meatloaf. The meaty texture was there, but you couldn't taste it...just the rosemary... It was horrible. Later on I re-made it with alot less Rosemary and it was beautiful. Suprisingly it's still my all-time favorite herb. Thanks for posting this, it's a great video!...I feel better. :D

In recipes calling for grapes, I have taken the habit of cutting the grapes in two. I need fewer grapes and the flavorful juices of the grape add another dimention to the dish.

Too bad about the excess of rosemary. We all have such mishaps. My most recent one was to put way too much wasabi paste inside a batch of sushi rolls I had prepared for diner without testing the potency of the stuff (it was from a new tube of a new brand I was trying.) The sushis were picture perfect but absolutely inedible.Best regards

Oh chef, I remember getting shouted by the head chef in the culinary school for making these mistakes in the school, oh boy, he used to throw the whole pan in the thrash and shouting, we standing there like fools.........we learn from there, as always enjoy.........:)

Chef John, thank you for sharing your cooking misadventures with us. It is comforting to know that you have your kitchen disasters too. I once put too much basil into a stew and threw the whole thing out.

I don't think anyone is able to top my food fail: I was responsible for making turkey on Thanksgiving. We had run out of butter, and instead of, oh, getting some, I decided to baste the turkey with sesame oil. Why? I have no idea. The result destroyed my innocence.

This is where pets and farm animals come in handy. You can usually still feed the kitchen disasters out that way!Chef John, you are fantastic! We all love you! And such mistakes should be told. We all have the proper warning now, so that hopefully we won't repeat the mistake! and really since you cook all the time and push your skills to the next level I would assume you have more than your share of such. In fact you probably should make a section of them so we can all laugh with you and heed the warnings! Call it something like "Don't try this at home!" And let us add our own as well. It would make this site a little extra fun. We all have "those" stories. My sister once decided to stuff cloves of garlic under the skin of a Thanksgiving turkey. She put 5 large bulbs worth of garlic cloves under that skin. The turkey looked like it had hives! It was inedible! Your disaster wasn't nearly that bad! My sister btw has remained a notoriously bad cook! lol

I would have tried this with the light red seedless grapes and deglazed with Beringer White Zin. and I probably would have taken my potato masher and squished the grapes a bit, not all of them just squish them 5 or 6 times. I think grapes are fantastic when they've been stewed long in a dish and have burst actually. The texture is lost, yes, but the dimension to the flavor of the sauce is fantastic! Much of which would come out of the skin, which wouldn't happen in this case. For home cooking, nothing too fancy mind you I often stew the red grapes with balsamic vinegar and lay Italian sausages on top. Very simple, very easy, and very pungent yet my whole family LOVES it and are excited when they see me make it. Grapes definitely a very cool addition to many dishes, they go especially well with pork I think. But I think the grape breaking open is key for flavor potential.

I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who finds rosemary overpowering. I use very sparingly. I watch Jamie Oliver and while I like a lot of his recipes I'm always puzzled at the amazing hunks of rosemary he puts in so many things. I'm pretty sure I would find those amounts inedible. But it looks cool on a stylish TV show, I suppose.

you're the best, Chef John. Thanks for sharing this. Re: the Pork with Grapes thing; I have a recipe for pork sausages with green grapes. Sear the sausages in a little oil, add the grapes and some butter, roast until done. splash of balsamic at the end. served over polenta or potatoes...awesome!

Good to see you used Some Rosemary as garnish on top on the final shot. I Guess iT is there to warn people. And NO I don't know why my spellchecker started adding all those capitels.I Guess iT is the iPad way.

This is the reason I've given up entirely on rosemary. If something calls for rosemary, I use thyme. It's hard (not impossible) to put too much in, and to my dilapidated taste buds they taste the same.

Also, and you probably don't want to hear this from one of your avid fans, but if you have a bad or bland sauce, you can always fix it with Wyler's chicken powder. You can fix anything with it.

Speaking of embarrassing mistakes, I often like to mix a mashed banana with some Greek yogurt and sprinkle the whole thing with cinnamon and it's quite yummy. Then, one time I accidentally added cayenne pepper instead of cinnamon. That was an unpleasant surprise!

I am such an appreciative fan of your cooking, instructions, and sense of humor. How wonderful of you to share one of those times when things didn't work out. Been there and done that, but this gives me the confidence and "license" to keep trying. I love the adventure of cooking. Nice to know we all have our moments!

I saw "Pork Recipe Fail" and thought this would be a true fail that would make me feel better about my many kitchen mishaps (the latest of which involves Chef John's onion ring recipe, which didn't work for me). Instead I see that, for Chef John, failing with a pork loin means the sauce is bland. Yeesh. Mister, I have truly failed with a pork loin: a pork loin that went from the oven to the trash, and not only was the pork loin ruined but also our meat thermometer. :-)

Wow. That was THE best cooking video I've ever seen. There's nothing like learning from cooking goofs, and watching someone else do it instead is infinitely more enjoyable (sorry) yet every bit as beneficial. More, PLEASE!!!

Chef John;Love your stuff. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery then I flatter you on a weekly basis! Friends and family think I'm a great cook....Nah..Chef John is...I just copy him. Thank you!Anyway, I'm a chemist. We have a saying; "Dilution is the solution to the pollution."(Cooking is chemistry in action at home, after all.)

Perhaps you could have cut your rosemary sauce by 2/3 with some chicken stock, butter and garlic cloves as an emergency sauce?

Thanks for sharing. I bet everyone has used too much spice or salt before. My grandmother used to tell me that you can spot a bad grill chef by whether or not they use garlic and how much they use. She said good meat needs nothing more than salt and maybe a little pepper and proper cooking. She said garlic has a strong flavor and masks the taste of the meat. If a chief uses a lot of garlic they are trying to hide a cheap cut of meat or their mistakes made while cooking it.I think of my grandmother and laugh to myself when I watch the "chiefs" on TV. Apparently none of them know how to cook. They all throw garlic on everything. I would not be surprise if they put garlic in a recipe for icecream cake or cookies. Maybe they became addicted or their taste buds have become desensitized to strength of the garlic?